First Solo Museum Exhibition in The Netherlands for Daniel Roth Announced

Daniel Roth, "Portmeirion Gwyllt Woods", 2009, overview.

HAARLEM.-De Hallen Haarlem will present the first solo museum exhibition in The Netherlands by the German artist Daniel Roth. The show will trace the development of the artist's oeuvre on the basis of existing and new work, from drawings, sculptures and photographs with a narrative character to ever more frugal, autonomous images in which the relation between the human body and the landscape is central. This exhibition can be seen from March 20 through June 6, 2010.

Daniel Roth (b. Schramberg, Ger., 1969) broke through internationally at the beginning of the millennium with installations which evoke slightly eerie imaginary worlds, in which the viewer is encouraged to fill in the missing pieces that will tie together a larger story.

The strongly narrative side of Roth's work, with references to literary genres such as science fiction and detective novels, is particularly clear in one of his key works, Glaswaldsee. This installation is assembled from photographs and line drawings in perspective of existing and imaginary sites, a spring filled with black liquid, and a walking stick. In all its components the installation depicts an imaginary structure on the floor of the Glaswaldsee, a lake in the Black Forest, from which the artist comes. Roth weaves autobiographical elements into his somewhat ominous vision of human nature. In his world humankind has drifted far from its bonds with nature, and is assiduously in search of ways to restore them.

A collection of new sculptures, drawings and a 16 mm film will be shown in the Verweyhal in De Hallen Haarlem. It is striking that the architecture, which in the earlier work was very explicit, increasingly takes on an organic form now, while in the sculptures landscape and the human body increasingly shade off into each other.